The Jim Rutt Show

The Jim Rutt Show


EP141 Heather Heying on Confronting Hyper-Novelty

September 14, 2021

Jim has a wide-ranging talk with evolutionary biologist Heather Heying about her & Bret Weinstein’s new book, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life...

Jim has a wide-ranging talk with evolutionary biologist Heather Heying about her & Bret Weinstein’s new book, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life. They discuss hyper-novelty & its challenges, niche-switching as the human niche, the naturalistic fallacy, the Ancient Beringians’ entry into the Americas, the hubris of reductionism & neo-cornucopianism, humans as the blankest slates, metaphoric & literal campfires, scaling laws in social groups, theory of mind, social media’s flattening effects including flattened affects, social media sabbaticals, the Sucker’s Folly, human population explosion, the Personal Responsibility Vortex, Proto-B communities, the lineage view of evolution, understanding exponentials & fat-tail events, culture as evolutionary adaptation (the Omega Principle), humanity’s Fourth Frontier, and more.

Episode Transcript
Heather’s Website
DarkHorse Podcast
JRS: EP24 - Bret Weinstein on Evolving Culture
JRS: Currents 17 - Bret Weinstein on Unity 2020
JRS: EP140 - Robin Dunbar on Friendship 

Heather Heying is an evolutionary biologist who applies the toolkit of evolutionary theory to problems large and small. She is a professor in exile, cohost of the DarkHorse Podcast alongside her husband Bret Weinstein, and the author of numerous essays.